Checking over and over again

The last few days in my internship have involved reviewing the content of the company's website and ensuring the information on it is up-to-date, accurate and clear to follow. I firstly began by reading through each page to make sure the content was correct and what we were promising our customers is something that we can achieve through the delivery of our services. 

There were many pages that required a lot of editing and also drafted some ideas of sentences that could be added to make the information easy to read and understand. I also recommended that some pages be removed as the content overlapped with other pages making them no longer necessary. 

My manager Doug, went through the content with me and made further suggestions on things I may have overlooked and any pages of information that needed to be added the website. We ended up minimising the navigation of the whole page down to what you can see in the below picture. Each of these links only have one or two drop down options with only the relevant information required. 

We are hoping that an updated website can minimise the number of enquiries customers need to make by phone, and by the time they discuss a possible contract with our sales team they are already fully informed. It is important that all customers to the business are fully informed on how the installation of an ATM works before they enter into a contract.

Knowing all of this, made the process of physically updating the website itself very nerve-racking for me as I did not want to make any errors. Given it is a public forum where errors would make the company seem careless, I was checking and editing over the content at least five times. What I found helpful (before publishing the content onto the website) was getting at least two or three other colleagues to check over the work as well. 

Once the content was checked and I was confident the content was free of errors, I logged into the administration system the company have set up for editing the website. From here I was able to insert the new content, remove unnecessary pages and reformat any sections that required it. 

I am pretty happy with the final product and find it pretty cool that most of the content on the website is my own writing and ideas. Hopefully it will assist our customers on being informed on our products and services in the future. 

When Crisis Strikes!

What a week I had last week at my internship! Working at Ezeatm has been an experience so far, involving a range of tasks aimed at improving our reputation with our customers. In the past year the company has seen a huge decline in reputation due to a change of management and poor management prior to last year. The company have slowly been rebuilding their services and how they deliver them, however it seems when crisis strikes, the last year's hard work has been erased!

Last Thursday, the 'switch' network that connects all of Ezeatm's ATMs to the various financial institutions it interacts with broke down and completely shut down all of the company's ATMs around Australia. Not only was the company affected, however competitors were affected as well. In addition to this some Eftpos providers went down, causing an influx of customer phone calls and complaints.

As part of the marketing team, it was damage control time. I was firstly called into a meeting with the Managing Director and the Operations Manager to be briefed on the actual cause of the problem and the best actions to take in terms of communicating with our customers and various stakeholders.

After this I was asked to draft an email blast to all customers on our database to inform them of the downtime and the steps Ezeatm were taking to rectify the situation. In the meantime, I was assisting the administration staff with receiving customer calls and explaining the current situation.

What I had running through my throughout the day was to ensure that the company is seeming to be transparent in the way they are approaching this crisis. Be honest with the customers, explain that it is a problem and the company is doing everything they possibly can to turn the situation around. As soon as I sent the email blast was sent out, the customer calls eased. I truly believe that by keeping people informed it improves the reputation of the company and allows crises to be minimised.

At the end of the day, as soon as the problem had been repaired, I drafted a second email blast which included that the system was up and running again, steps each customer had to follow to reboot their ATM and an apology for any inconvenience caused.

The majority of people enquiring about this issue were calm when they phoned and no one was angry at the situation. I believe this is because everyone was kept informed about the situation and as any new information cam to hand it was sent out immediately.

Overall I was proud of the way I handled to crisis under the guidance of my Managing Director and felt that the whole day was a strong example of team work and effective communication.

For more information on Ezeatm's network provider First Data, please see the link below.

https://www.firstdata.com/en_au/home.html


Rebecca

The Beginning - PR in the Real World

I am Rebecca and I am currently working for an ATM company in a marketing and public relations role, gaining experience in dealing with a wide variety of stakeholders. The company is called Ezeatm and offers generic, non-bank ATMs to small business owners around Australia. Our most important customers would be small business owners in rural areas, particularly rural and remote New South Wales and Queensland.

Communication is key

I am currently working for the Managing Director of the company who wanted me on board to assist in the development of the company website and company communications directed towards key customers and organisations we work alongside. Ezeatm works in conjunction with two large organisations in order to provide reliable and efficient products to their customers.

Crisis Management

Dealing with technology on a regular basis can cause a variety of operational issues, customer dissatisfaction and tension between collaborating organisations. Crisis management is of great importance within a company like this. I have worked with the Managing Director to devise effective plans to combat or prevent a crisis from occurring.

Internal Relations

The internal set up of the organisation is challenging also as there are three offices, the Head Office being in Perth and two others in Sydney and Brisbane. The company operates largely as a team where each department relies on each other in order to carry out their individual duties. It is important that internal relations are maintained and effective communication between the three offices is maintained at all times. This often fails in busy periods, which is something the Managing Director has asked me to help with.

In my first week I had a meeting with an outsourced website design consultancy who trained me to use a program which involves sending email "blasts" to our key stakeholder groups. We send them to staff (internally) and customers (externally). We also constantly communication with organisations we collaborate with to ensure the smooth delivery of our product and our service.

I hope this first blog posts provides an insight into how the organisation works. My future blog posts will focus on the key areas I have briefly touched on in this first blog post. Stay tuned for more interesting experiences!

Rebecca